Why continue with this? That was the worst thread I've ever seen here. I can see what I wrote earlier was ignored by the ignorant C programmers, as expected:
Notice one of the only things a fanatical C programmer will defend C with is popularity. AIDS is also popular, often by being forced upon others who don't want it.
This is another form of that popularity defense which I detest. If I implemented a C in Lisp, no one would claim that C is really Lisp, but implement Lisp in C and suddenly it's evidence everything is C. Meanwhile, C isn't the underlying machine code, no, that's just silly. The buck stops at C, for no particular reason other than it does.
When a language has a standardized semantics, the implementation is irrelevant. Learn this.
http://textboard.org/prog/174/249
That's simple. Unlike C, with its take-it-or-leave-it approach to system design, Common Lisp is more flexible, and tries to avoid making demands on how programs should be structured or written:
(setf (readtable-case *readtable*) :invert)
(defvar x 0)
(defvar X 1)
(format 't "~a == ~a" x X)
0 == 1That's a nonsensical thing for the program to tell me, but it works just fine. Another example is Common Lisp allowing the programmer flexibility in what default values should be for things, which many other good languages do. We can contrast this with the C and Go I-know-better approach, where the default value is zero or garbage, and the programmer is told to cope with it.